Abstract
In the food industry, heating and cooling are key processes where CFD can play an important role in improving quality, productivity and reducing energy costs. Cooling products after baking is crucial for storage and transportation; the product has to be cooled efficiently to a specified temperature (often to fulfill regulatory requirements) whilst preserving its quality. This study involves the analysis of spiral cooling refrigerators used in cooling food products, in this case, Cornish Pasties. Three separate sets of CFD models were developed and validated against experimental data taken in the laboratory and measurements taken in use in industry. In the first set of models a full CFD model was developed of a refrigeration spiral including the pasties, and used to study the heat transfer from the products to the air. Further simulations were carried out on individual pasties to explore the pasty cooling and heat transfer to the air in more detail, with the pasty geometry being determined from MRI scans. In the final set of simulations, Image Based Meshing (IBM) was used to determine the interior structure of the pasty and develop a full heat conduction model of the interior, which was compared with separate laboratory experiments using jets of cold air to cool the pasty. In all cases, good agreement was obtained between the CFD results and experimental data, whilst the CFD simulations provide valuable information about the air flows and cooling in the industrial system.
Highlights
In the present study CFD simulations have been conducted to investigate the industrial cooling of a specific food product (Cornish pasties)
An initial experiment was conducted to determine the thermal conductivity of the pasty, which was used with the already determined thermophysical properties for the subsequent CFD simulations
Results were compared and validated against air flow data measured in the actual industrial spiral
Summary
One of the key steps, after cooking, is cooling the product for storage and transport. A number of researchers have focused on developing empirical and analytical relations for predicting the cooling/freezing time for typical food products [1,2,3,4,5]. These empirical expressions are valid only for specific groups of foods as most of them were developed for fruits and vegetables using uniform shapes [4]. Choi and Okos [6] have proposed a generic model for approximately predicting thermophysical properties
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